frag.machine wrote on Jan 8, 2011, 09:40:More and more I see PC gaming in the hands of indie developers, and big publishers sheltered inside the console bunkers, where they have far more control over piracy and prices (although not complete control as we can see in the recent episode of the PS3 crackdown). In other words, PC will keep its role as cradle for innovative, low/medium cost and risk projects, and consoles will be the preferred place for big budget games exploring low risk IP's. It's very similar to the current movie market division between "artistic" and blockbuster, kept the due proportions.

But publishers may find themselves in big problems due to that policy. See this market research papaer that simply mirrors what many other papers have been telling lately:

More and more I see PC gaming in the hands of indie developers, and big publishers sheltered inside the console bunkers, where they have far more control over piracy and prices (although not complete control as we can see in the recent episode of the PS3 crackdown). In other words, PC will keep its role as cradle for innovative, low/medium cost and risk projects, and consoles will be the preferred place for big budget games exploring low risk IP's. It's very similar to the current movie market division between "artistic" and blockbuster, kept the due proportions.

JaguarUSF wrote on Jan 2, 2011, 13:24:Seriously, anyone who still uses XP needs to upgrade to 7.

Yeah, well, do all of my old games work on Windows 7 yet? Specifically, my 200-game catalog from Good Ole Games? They are working on backwards compatibility but it's slow going. Call me a Luddite, but I don't think I'll ever be ready to abandon some of the great games of the past.

Anyway, I'm not miffed about this; it had to happen sooner or later with a game I really wanted. I just HATE dual booting.

Well, you can always use DOSBOX, right ?

I'm still on XP because frankly so far I hadn't a good reason to upgrade. I'm still running a 4-year old game/dev rig and most of my stuff is running well enough (of course, some not so old games like Prototype and Borderlands could benefit from a dual/quad core, but the video card is holding things pretty well so far). Maybe in 6 months I'll build a new one and then I will move Windows 7. Looks quite decent from what I can see in others computers, far from the the mess Vista used to be.

About the news, seems a quite logic move to me; as someone already said, it's very likely motivated by support costs reductions. Since I'm not exactly a fan of the series, it won't affect me.

kxmode wrote on Dec 14, 2010, 00:07:Why do so many of you love this but there's no mention of Second Life? From my experience SL offers a lot of what MindCraft offers. And yes, I'm aware of the negative uses of SL. Still, for all intents and purposes it is an open sandbox platform where you can create anything you want. And it isn't pixelated.

SL have no pigs. Or cows. Or sheeps. Or chickens. Or CREEPERS OH SHEEZ GET OFF MY STUFF NOOOO! SSSSS BOOOOM!

"When it comes to videogames, particularly first person shooter games, anything less than a response time of 30 or 40 milliseconds is unacceptable"

Duh, this guy should try to live in a 3rd world country like me. I feel lucky for having a 150 ms latency in TF2, and this doesn't stop me from pwning a bunch of LPB noobs (of course I frequently get pwned by LPB snipers with 10 or 15 ms latency, but hey, shit happens). It's all about skillz, man.

JS: To zero in on the issue of the interface, this is the kind of thing that we're seeing with the Kinect, as well. It's novel, there are some new things that you can do, but there are a lot of things that you can't do that maybe you want to do as a gamer.

JC: The Kinect and the Move stuff, we have no intention of supporting that right now because our games are carefully crafted around what's going to play well on a console controller. And it's hard to add a frill on top of that.

Yeah, it has nothing to do with the quality of the games and that PC gamers are less forgiving. Yeah, there's no way you can make money on the PC, I mean Blizzard has proven that time and time again what an utter waste of money it is trying to put forth PC titles.

The problem is that it's much easier to make money on consoles. Pretty much any game with nice graphics and sufficient marketing can sell 1 million units on consoles. Selling 1 million units of a PC exclusive generally requires a much better game.

ATM minecraft gameplay is pretty crude, specially multiplayer which resumes to a online Lego. IMO single player is more fun: there's the first night rush where you need to run against the clock to build a shelter, and later there's the cave exploration part that can be really creepy. The halloween update added a new hell-like dimension and mobs but it really needs to add more content to became attractive to people more used to FPS games.

Slashman wrote on Nov 12, 2010, 07:34:It's the same thing as people pointing their fingers at Microsoft for monopolizing the OS market. When Windows 95 was a huge, buggy mess and barely trying to stand on its own, no other company thought that it was worth it to compete in the home desktop market. But then everyone wants to crap all over them years after when(surprise, surprise) they are practically the only viable choice for a PC OS bar Mac and Linux.

Verno wrote on Nov 11, 2010, 10:55:Well the big bitch seems to be that retailers cave and carry Steamworks titles. What's the solution there though? There is no standard distribution format for digital games right now. The entire industry would need to collaborate on that and in an open market some companies will simply ignore it.

I agree that it sucks that Direct2Drive has to sell a Steamwork title for example, as it exposes their customers directly to Steam which is the entire goal. I just don't see a solution other than moving the market backwards five years.

Don't give them ideas... They can send a terminator 12 years back in the past and kill Gabe Newell before the first Half Life.

"At the moment the big digital distributors need to stock games with Steam. But the power resides with bricks and mortar retailers, they can refuse to stock these titles. Publishers are hesitant, but retail must put pressure on them."

Seriously though, open source drivers would only make sales of the product increase, especially after the novelty and holiday rush on the product wears off.

Problem is: Microsoft probably is selling Kinect with a thin (if any) profit margin, expecting to sell *LOTS* of XBox360 exclusive titles. If people manages to use Kinect with other platforms their plans will be fubared.

Eldaron Imotholin wrote on Oct 10, 2010, 17:56:I'm not sure why Blues did a literal transcription of what that Gibson guy said. Makes the guy look pretty dumb although transcriptions more often than not look messed up.

Anyway, I think the guy is correct in what he said. Join forces and let the PC blow the console industry away! Viva la revolution!

The only acceptable way for MS to join forces with Steam would be they making an aggressive offer and buy Steam. A much wiser move than, let's say, to buy the rotten carcass known as Yahoo!. For the greater good of the PC gaming I hope this won't never, ever, happen.

ASeven wrote on Oct 10, 2010, 15:17:Competition is always good to the market, regardless of what some clueless devs say. Saying that, GfWL is an abomination and Steam already won the battle but I hope Steam never gets a full monopoly of the market and other distribution venues like D2D, GamersGate and the like never disappear. Not having competition is the sure way to see any market slowly die in terms of good prices and quality of product.